Edinburgh International Film Festival reveals 2025 programme

Navigating the Edinburgh Festivals in August is a bit like solving a complex maths equation where you have to try and balance out the hours in the day and the money in your bank with the huge number of events you’d like to attend. The final variables slip into place today with the Edinburgh International Film Festival announcing its full programme for its 2025 edition, which features 43 new feature films, 18 of which are world premieres.

One of the biggest developments this year is the return of Filmhouse as a venue. The recently renovated cinema, which was once the HQ and central hub for the festival, will share hosting duties with the Cameo, the similarly iconic cinema just a few minutes away by foot. The close proximity of these chief venues should make the festival feel more compact than it did last year, although there are two new venues taking EIFF to other parts of the city. The Vue in the Omni Centre screens some events, as will the 150-seater Hawthornden Theatre inside the National Gallery of Scotland – the latter is being described as a ‘pop-up’ venue, but it seems to be much more appropriate than the ‘pop-up’ venues used in Edinburgh University spaces last year. 

We already know that the festival will kick off with Sorry, Baby, the exciting debut feature from triple-threat talent Eva Victor, who writes, directs and stars in the film. Proceedings will come to a close with the world premiere of Reality Is Not Enough, an intimate documentary about Irvine Welsh. Directed by Edinburgh-based filmmaker Paul Sng, the film follows the Trainspotting and Filth author at a midlife crossroads when he’s starting to realise his hedonistic days might be behind him. Also previously announced were the world premiere of Ben Wheatley’s BULK and the UK premiere of Macon Blair’s remake of 80s splatter classic The Toxic Avenger; these films bookend Midnight Madness, the festival’s late-night strand celebrating genre filmmaking.

On-stage Talks

The great Andrea Arnold will be in Edinburgh for an on-stage Q&A and to present her daring Glasgow-set debut Red Road. The aforementioned Ben Wheatley will also take part in an on-stage talk alongside his producing partner Andy Starke. Andrew Macdonald, the chair of EIFF’s board and the producer of many a great film from Trainspotting to 28 Years Later, spoke on stage last year with Alex Garland and he’s back this year chatting with his brother, director Kevin Macdonald. Nia DaCosta, who’s currently in post-production on the follow-up to 28 Years Later – 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – will also give an on-stage talk;. Hopefully whoever is interviewing DaCosta will tease out some answers as to where 28 Years Later goes following its eye-popping ending.

Features Screening Out of Competition

Among the internationally celebrated filmmakers with work in the festival are Belgian filmmaking duo Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne; their ensemble drama Young Mothers screens. There's also French thriller specialist Dominik Moll, whose new film, Case 137, is a procedural exploring violence and corruption in Paris, and New York-based Argentine filmmaker Lucio Castro, who made the extraordinary queer drama End of the Century, is back with erotic thriller After This Death. There’s also the latest work from the talented German filmmaker Jan-Ole Gerster, who’s probably still best known for his Berlin hipster hangout movie Oh Boy!, a big favourite from EIFF 2013. He returns with his first English language film, Islands, which stars Sam Riley and Stacy Martin and is described as “a psychosexual mystery” involving a tennis coach, a family, and a missing person.

There’s also plenty of British talent in the programme. Paul Andrew Williams knocked audiences' socks off at EIFF in 2006 with his debut London to Brighton; he returns to Edinburgh with Dragonfly, which follows the relationship between a lonely pensioner (Brenda Blethyn) and her troubled neighbour (Andrea Riseborough). Another EIFF alumnus is Andrew Kötting. His brilliant off-kilter debut, Gallivant, won an award at the festival in 1996 and he’s back this year with the world premiere of The Memory Blocks, which EIFF describes as an “experimental reflection on the changeable and complex nature of memory through the lens of neurodivergence”. 

Gerard Johnson opened EIFF with a slap in 2014 with his muscular crime drama Hyena; he’s part of Midnight Madness with new film Odyssey, which centres on a ruthless real estate agent played by Polly Maberly. Scottish director John McPhail, whose zombie musical Anna and the Apocalypse went down a storm at EIFF in 2018, presents the world premiere of his new family-friendly comedy Grow. We’re also looking forward to Zodiac Killer Project, the new work from Charlie Shackleton, which is described as a meta documentary playfully exploring the tropes and moral ickiness of true crime documentaries. 

Beyond the big name and homegrown films, we’re intrigued by the sound of About a Hero, Piotr Winiewicz’s crime mystery narrated by an AI version of Werner Herzog. One of the most powerful-looking films in the EIFF programme is Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, Sepideh Farsi’s documentary featuring 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, who was killed by an IDF airstrike the day after the film was selected to play at Cannes. For an askance snapshot of a country under siege, there’s Gar O'Rourke’s Sanatorium, a documentary shot within a crumbling Odessa health resort, where a dwindling clientele has rejuvenating treatments and strange therapies while war rages just miles away. Also look out for Brendan Canty’s Christy, a beautifully drawn and warmly funny portrait of young people in Cork, and tender Spanish drama Deaf from Eva Libertad, about a deaf woman whose life is irrevocably altered by motherhood.

Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence

As was the case last year, the festival is very much focused on its main competition, The Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, which features ten films that will make their bow at the festival. There are a couple of familiar names in the lineup. Veteran Iranian filmmaker Abdolreza Kahani had one of the strongest films in the competition last year – the tragicomic A Shrine – and he’s vying for top prize again with Mortician, about a mild-mannered Iranian mortician in Canada who forms an unexpected bond with a dissident singer in exile. The Violators’ director Helen Walsh brings her sophomore feature On the Sea, a rough-hewn queer love story set in a rural fishing village that centres on a married mussel farmer who falls for a younger man. And 13 years after his ace debut Stud Life, Campbell X is back with his second full-length feature, queer road movie Low Rider. 

Elsewhere in the competition lineup you’ll find In Transit, a queer drama starring the great Jennifer Ehle, from American indie director Jaclyn Bethany; Best Boy, from Montreal filmmaker Jesse Noah Klein, a satire taking on the nuclear family; and Blue Film, from American filmmaker Elliot Tuttle, which is described as a thriller centred on a queer camboy who agrees to spend the night with a mysterious stranger. 

File Mas Bouzidi’s Concessions alongside The Last Picture Show and Goodbye Dragon Inn, as it’s another love letter to the power of cinema centred on a soon-to-close fleapit. Greek filmmaker Harry Lagoussis presents his debut Novak, an intriguing-sounding work about an ostracised neuroscientist who finds he’s being hero-worshipped by a group of young scientists enamoured by his discredited theories. Also in the mix are Ondine Viñao’s Two Neighbours, a dark comedy set in New York inspired by Aesop's fable Avaricious and Envious, plus the only doc in competition, Once You Shall Be One Of Those Who Lived Long Ago, by Alexander Rynéus and Per Bifrost, about the remaining residents of Malmberget, a small town in Northern Sweden that’s collapsing into the mines beneath it. 

Retrospectives: Bond, Budd Boetticher and Paddy Higson

Traditionally, retrospectives have always been at the cornerstone of EIFF’s programming. They make their way back this year with two film series that are well-beloved by audiences but rarely get shown on the big screen. There's The Ranown Cycle, five fat-free westerns made fast and cheap by Budd Boetticher in the late 50s that transcend their B-western origins through Boetticher’s supreme filmmaking craftsmanship, their sharply written scripts and the magnetic performance of their rugged star, Randolph Scott. All are great but we particularly recommend The Tall T and Ride Lonesome. Ehsan Khoshbakht, a curator of the great Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, will present introductions to some of the films. And EIFF will also screen all of Sean Connery’s Bond films (with the exception of the unofficial entry Never Say Never Again), from Dr. No to Diamonds Are Forever via high points in the series like From Russia with Love and Goldfinger. We’re told members of the Connery clan and special guests will introduce each sure-to-be-popular screening. 

In 2025, EIFF will also pay tribute to producer Paddy Higson, who died back in April. Dubbed the “Mother of the Scottish film industry”, Higson was a key collaborator with Bill Forsyth on his early Scottish films like That Sinking Feeling and Gregory’s Girl and helped bring landmarks like Taggart and Monarch of the Glen to the small screen. The festival present her rarely-screened film Silent Scream, which was directed by David Hayman and won the very first Michael Powell award at EIFF in 1990, as well as her much-loved Restless Natives, the enduring comedy about benevolent bandits who hold up tourists buses in the Scottish Highlands, only to become tourist attractions in their own right.

The above doesn’t even scratch the surface of the programme which includes ten shorts competing for The Thelma Schoonmaker Prize, five other shorts programmes out of competition (which intriguingly features an animation directed by Renée Zellwegger, called They), a showcase of the films made in the first NFTS Sean Connery Lab, a live recording of the 90 Minutes or Less Film Fest Podcast, and much genre fun in the Midnight Madness strand.

EIFF director Paul Ridd writes in the press release that he’d like for the festival to have a legacy beyond this programme. “For one week in August we celebrate film and its bright future in the heart of Edinburgh,” says Ridd. “But we hope the ripple effect for our films, for our filmmakers and for our audiences is felt year-round and all over the world. Bring it on.”

EIFF runs 14-20 Aug; full programme at edfilmfest.org